The school year is coming to an end, and summer will be upon us soon. Have you made plans for your family vacation yet? Whether you choose to go near or far you can incorporate an element of family history into your travel plans.
When some people think about blending family history with a road trip, they think of visits to cemeteries and courthouses. Depending on your family’s interest in research, this many not incite shouts of joy from your family members. But there are other ways to combine family history learning that will add to the happy memories of your family vacation.
Kids and teenagers can have powerful connections with their ancestors as they get to know them through photos and stories. Having an experience in a physical location with ties to an ancestor can leave a positive impression that will last forever.
A fun mobile app for iOS makes it even easier to visit family history locations on your summer vacation. The Family Nexus is a free app that integrates with your FamilySearch account to automatically plot 6 generations of your family tree. Family members will enjoy exploring the map or tracing the locations for a particular family member. Automatic alerts to your phone when you get near a place from your family history could encourage a spontaneous detour!
In addition to the free features, users can subscribe to unlock additional premium features. For example, subscribers can access photos and stories about their ancestors. They can also customize what life events appear on the map. It also allows you to “check in” and keep track of ancestral places you have visited. One of the newest features allows users to utilize the power of mobile GPS to update the precise locations of birth, marriage, residence, or burial locations.
An Android version is currently under development and is scheduled for release in August 2018.
Download The Family Nexus app and make new family history discoveries and connections on your summer vacation this year! Learn more at https://TheFamilyNexus.com/app.
My name’s Alex Balinski. Melanie’s been super nice to provide me this opportunity to tell you a little bit about a free family history service I recently started called Lifey.
Here’s a run down of everything you should know about Lifey.
What Is A “Lifey”?
So, to start off, let me define what a Lifey is. A Lifey is like a selfie about your life. It’s your life story in video format. It’s like a browsable, shareable video journal that you can embed anywhere online. I personally believe Lifeys are the best way to share your life story.
Currently there are two types of Lifeys we can create for you (they’re both free): Individual Lifeys and Family Lifeys.
Individual Lifey Example
Below is one of the dozens of free individual Lifeys we’ve created. You can see Clint’s Lifey is broken up into seven sections: Childhood, Aviation, Mission, UVU, Career, Family and Other. Under each section there are specific stories/insights that Clint decided to share from his life.
Individual Lifeys are easy to prepare for and to record. They usually take 1-3 hours to record, though we’ve had some individuals create Lifeys that are 4+ hours long. The beauty of creating a Lifey, is that it’s free (it’d normally cost hundreds to thousands of dollars to pay someone to create a similar video autobiography), it’s long form (1-7 hours long) and it’s browsable (viewers can jump to whichever story/topic interests them).
Family Lifey Example
Below is an example of a family Lifey. Family Lifeys only take about an hour to record (depending on how many people are in your family).
Instead of a one-time comprehensive Lifey about someone’s life, a family Lifey is more like an ongoing family video journal where once a year you can take your family on a date to the studio and each take 5-10 minutes in front of the camera to share highlights from the previous year.
How Lifey Got Started
The story of how Lifey started goes back to the summer of 2006. I was attending my first term at Brigham Young University and I felt strongly like I should look into Broadcast Journalism. I attended BYU for two years, served a two-year mission in Argentina, and then finished my Bachelor’s degree at BYU. While studying journalism I felt impressed to create the Prepare to Serve project where we video interview returned missionaries about their missions, etc.
Then about one year ago I felt inspired to shift my focus to working on Lifey.
Why Record A Lifey?
I believe there is huge value in opening up, and sharing our ideas with each other. I believe every person has experiences and insights that they can share, that can be helpful to others.
Hands down the most prized family history possession I have is my Mother’s Lifey. I’m so grateful that we took a few hours to record my Mom’s Lifey. For many years to come my Mother will still be able to influence, and teach my children values, principles and testimony from her life experiences, because we recorded her Lifey. While reading a journal is good, nothing quite beats hearing and seeing my Mother share her stories in her own words. When I watch my Mom’s Lifey, it feels like she’s having a heart-to-heart conversation with me.
More Info About Lifey
We currently offer free video life histories at our office in Provo, Utah (if you live outside of Utah, and would like me to consider traveling to your state to offer free Lifeys in your state for a few days, please email me at alexbalinski@gmail.com).
Our service is completely free (you can leave a donation if you’d like).
A Lifey typically takes 2-4 hours to record, though we’ve had some Lifeys last longer.
Lifeys are recorded in front of a green screen (which works great, as long as you don’t wear a green top).
Lifeys are self-directed. When you come in, I’ll welcome you to the studio and get the camera, microphone and lights all working, and then I’ll press record, shut the door, and let you share however much you’d like to share from your life.
We encourage people to let their Lifeys be public, so their stories and insights are easily accessible for family and friends.
Lifeys are recorded in 4K.
Lifeys can be organized into however many stories/topics as you’d like (we once had an older gentleman come in and share 99 different stories/insights from his life).
Lifeys can also be used to organize any other YouTube videos (home videos, etc.)
If You’re Interested…
If you’d like me to create a Lifey for you or a loved one, feel free to email me at alexbalinski@gmail.com. If you’d like to learn more about the Lifey project, you might enjoy watching the videos on the Lifey About page.
I hope you have a wonderful summer! The Gospel’s true!
The Church is really focusing member’s attention on Family History, and Sugardoodle is here to HELP!
A few months ago Melanie and I were invited to be part of the 2016 Rootstech Family Discovery Day. Our task was to come up with a super fun activity that the youth would love AND that would create some excitement about searching for the deceased. We came up with a “Find-A-Grave” hunt. The hunt was so successful that we had lots of youth leaders and stake family history experts stop and ask us for our handout so they could take the activity back to their youth groups, wards and families.
We decided to post the activity and worksheet here on our blog along with a few pointers on how you can do a similar activity.
FIND-A-GRAVE HUNT…
Give everyone who will be participating the Find-A-Grave hunt a worksheet. Explain that this is a timed activity. They will need to go onto Find-A-Grave.com and search for each name on their worksheet. They then record the date they died, what invention they created and one simple fact {for instance where they were buried}. Whoever finishes first is the winner.
VARIATIONS:
~ You can do this as teams, sharing cell phones at your ward building or home.
~You can do this as a scavenger hunt where you divide the youth into groups and as a team they drive with a leader to a designated house in the ward. There they hunt online for 3 of the graves. They then drive to another designated house and search for the other 3 graves. First team back to the chapel wins! *This is fun to include other families in your ward in the hunt when you use their computers. It’s a great way to get you ward family involved.
We would love to hear what fun things you have done to foster a love for Family History in your ward and family so we can post them on our blog. Please email us at april.sugardoodle@gmail.com
Have you noticed how busy our temples have become? Don’t you just love it when you see youth from your ward or your children’s friends there?
My eighteen year old son likes to go bright and early Saturday morning. He often returns home to say that he ran into several of his friends there. Seeing his peers serving in the temple increases his desire to serve there. I’ve seen his service do this same thing to some of his peers. There is power, synergism and increased joy when we do things together.
If you children have not caught onto how fun Family History & Temple Work can be, consider taking them to Family Discovery Day at Rootstech — February 6th. {You will need to register online but it’s FREE!}
This year Rootstech is doing a fun “Armed with Power” Treasure Quest. Imagine your children along with 1,000 other children finding excitement and joy as they hunt for different activities around the event center that perk their interests into their own family history.
Hope to see you {and your children} there. Be sure to stop by the Sugardoodle booth for your children to play “Find-A-Grave.” It’s part of the treasure quest and is a fun computer hunt where the youth have the find the graves of 8 famous people. How fast can they find them?
